Floyd: Your head in a tornado alert — Use it or lose it

If, when the warnings sirens sounded Tuesday, you switched on the weather radio and perhaps started herding the kids toward a downstairs closet, this question is not for you.

If, however, you went right on running errands or pruning shrubs or practicing the banjo, it is. If you jumped out of your car on a freeway overpass, hoping to get some cellphone video of a real-live twister, it is absolutely for you:

WHAT PART OF “TAKE COVER” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?

It’s abundantly clear that in this week’s emergency, most people really did put their noggins to good use. The ratio of physical injury to property loss was reassuringly low -- plenty of survivors had the good sense to head for an interior room, which in a couple of cases, was the only room left intact in the whole house.

But there was also a measure of sheer dumb luck.

The twisters hit at mid-day while many people were at work or at school, where mandatory emergency procedures took effect. Warnings systems were thorough and effective. And those who rolled the dice and ignored the danger came out all right -- this time.

There always seem to be people who just don’t process the message, who just assume they’re too busy to drop everything and seek shelter -- or who think they’ll miss all the excitement if they hide from the storm.

Henry Margusity, a senior meteorologist for AccuWeather, told The Dallas Morning News he monitored the violent storms through remote traffic cameras and watched in horror as people hopped out of their cars to get a better view of a twister or even kept on driving directly toward a tornado.

“The complacency is just totally frustrating to the meteorologists, with all the info we’re trying to pass along,” he said. “People really need to think about the weather.”

Personally, my policy is that if you can actually see a twister, it is past time to be in a bathtub with a mattress pulled over your head.

Not everybody sees it that way. It’s human nature, I guess, to want to lay an eyeball on the source of all the excitement. Or, perhaps, to suppose that since the last few weather warnings came to nothing, this one is no big deal, either.

That’s a dangerous mindset, one that experts spend a lot of time studying and worrying about.

“We’d like to think that as soon as we way there is a tornado warning, everyone would run to the basement,” a Kansas City forecaster told USA Today in a story published Tuesday, the day before our local storms. “That’s not how it is.”

Last year, tornadoes killed 550 Americans. An outbreak across several states resulted in 316 fatalities in a single day; 161 died a month later when a huge tornado hit Joplin, Mo. Are we, on the whole, smarter than people in those areas? Not likely. We’re probably just luckier.

That awful toll is part of the reasoning behind a new pilot program that resorts to a simple, effective method for getting people to respond -- by scaring the bejeezus out of them.

Starting this week, a handful of weather service offices in Kansas and Missouri have been authorized to use such graphic terms as “mass devastation,” “unsurvivable” and “catastrophic” in addition to the basic warning-and-sirens message.

Will it make a difference? Hard to say.

Maybe they ought to try: “You are minutes away from being sucked into the whirling, razor-sharp blades of a massive blender” or “It’s your head: Use it or lose it!”

Social scientists recruited to help study human behavior under dangerous weather conditions say that, as accurate as modern forecasting abilities are, some people unrealistically want a guarantee that a twister will drop down in their own front yards before they’ll alter their routines.

“People feel they would constantly be going to a shelter if they heeded every tornado warning,” one researcher told The Associated Press.

“Most of the time, if you have a tornado watch or a warning, you might be shut down for 45 minutes to an hour and half,” he said. “People wait that long for a flight at the airport all the time without thinking anything about it.”

If you sought shelter when the warning sounded this week, you were smart. If you stood outside gawking at the sky, you were just lucky.

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